I thought she was made of china, the first time I met her. Girls that perfect didn't exist, only dolls. Frozen icons of perfection, unattainable.
She made me feel clumsy - she was slight, small, pale, hiding behind perfect ringlets. On paper we sound the same - the same could be said of me (apart from the ringlets; my hair is straight, limp) but she wore it with pride, I treated my height as a disability, my weight as an inconvienience, my skintone a health hazard. I looked sickly, she looked ethereal.
Somehow it wasn't a surprise when she spoke...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She shielded her eyes from the flashes of light that arced across the blackened sky, her face soaked with tears, her heart pounding in her chest as the cacophony of noise rattled her skull.
In London, a family huddled together in a corner of their living room, across from the window that had blown itself out from the force of the first impact. They held between them the grandmothers crucifix, praying to their God as if he could save them.
A man stood atop the Eifel...
“Come here.”
The little boy looked at her, then back at the kitchen door.
“Come here!”
Something crashed in the kitchen. The boy turned away and stumbled over to her. She took him by the hand. “Come on, we have to go.”
“What's wrong with him?”
“Doesn't matter, just come on. We have to hide.”
“Why?”
“I did something, and now he's mad.”
“What did you do?”
“We have to hide.”
“What did you do?”
“I stole all of it.”
“What?”
“After school today, I stole all his drinks.”
“All of them?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he gets mad when he...
The border. He had. To find. The border. He'd made this trip a hundred times before and each time the damn thing moved. When he thought of it - if he thought of it at all - he imagined it as some kind of mystical shimmering veil. Except you couldn't actually see it. Couldn't map it. It might be there with the next step or it could take a thousand more and he never knew which it would be. He was pretty sure he'd been walking straight for it but... had he just been circling? Was he even heading in...
He embraces me and I smile.
The cheat!
Just to make this good, I even rest my head on his chest. Deep breaths to make myself seem calm, even when anger and hurt course through my body.
"How was your weekend, Honey?" The question in casual as I run my fingers through his hair. He kisses me and says, "It was alright. How about your's?" I kiss him back and try not to think about what I'm about to do.
"It was fine. Oh, I have something to show you." I reach into my back pocket and show him the...
The sky was blue, the grass was green and the little clouds were as fluffy as the picture in a child's reading book. All was well with the world. And on her swing, she could see above the park, above the neat hedges and the flowering bushes. She could, as she swung higher still, see over the row of terraced houses and into the street beyond. Over the flowering cherry trees and the neat gardens with their blossoming plants, over the heads of the middle class and middle aged gardeners and housewives and shoppers and busy bodies of the suburban...
Heather had never found her talent.
The smallest amount of knitting made her arms feel like they'd fall from her shoulders. Her paintings looked like they'd been crafted by a toddler. Even decoupage, just gluing paper onto things to decorate them, seemed beyond her reach; in every project the images were wrinkled and unattractive. What was she doing wrong? Time and time again she struggled to release her creative genius, the one she had been told lived inside each and every person, but evidently she preferred to stay hidden deep inside.
Standing on the bridge, she watched the churning waters...